In grammar school we read "Harrison Bergeron" and at the time I was a little surprised to be reading a story in a school textbook that seemed to be either making fun of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution or criticizing the doctrine of equality or both. "Harrison Bergeron" first appeared in F&SF and has been reprinted many times and even filmed several times.
It is the year 2081 and thanks to constitutional amendments (of which there are over 200,) the government ruthlessly enforces equality by mandating various handicaps. Smart people have to wear ear pieces that disrupt their thoughts with piercing noises, strong and agile people have to wear weights that slow them down and wear them out, attractive people must don hideous masks, etc. The plot concerns George and Hazel Bergeron, whose son, Harrison, is the strongest and smartest man ever born and who has been arrested. G and H are watching ballerinas on TV--the ballerinas, weighted down and distracted, are fumbling all over the place. Suddenly Harrison, having escaped, bursts into the TV studio, declares himself Emperor, throws off his handicaps and those of the most gifted of the ballerinas and demonstrates how beautifully two talented people can dance. Then the government official in charge of the handicapping agency, a woman, arrives and shoots down the self-proclaimed Emperor and his lovely Empress.
On its face, "Harrison Bergeron" appears to be a ferocious, over-the-top attack on radical egalitarianism and government efforts to achieve equality. But when we look at the wikipedia page on Vonnegut we see that he was a socialist who thought Americans too quick to denounce communism. I think we have to entertain the strong possibility that "Harrison Bergeron" is not a warning against government interventionism but a lampoon of such warnings, that Vonnegut here, like the New Yorker with its controversial cover illustration in which Barack Hussein Obama is burning the Stars and Stripes and his wife is carrying a Kalashnikov, is painting opposition to government that actively pursues "social justice" as ridiculous.
The outlandish nature of some elements of the story--Harrison is a seven-foot tall fourteen-year old who breaks chains with his bare hands, and he and his Empress discover the ability to fly--seems to support such a reading, as does the name of the Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers; while her first and middle names obviously reference the hunter goddess who shoots people as a means of punishing hubris, her last name reminds one of labor leader Samuel Gompers. Maybe Vonnegut is presenting to readers a satiric view of how he believes supporters of limited government see themselves (as god-like individualists) and their opponents (nagging, autocratic and irrational people, especially women.) It may be notable that Harrison Bergeron, the super-strong genius, tries to use his superior abilities to overthrow our republican society and make himself Emperor, like the kid in Pohl's "The Bitterest Pill;" lefties think we need a powerful public sector to keep private individuals with superior resources from lording it over others.
Obviously this story suits the themes of An ABC of Science Fiction that people are jerks and the future is going to suck, and like so many stories picked by Boardman it is some kind of satire. But unlike many of the other pieces in this book it is actually funny and offers hope, whether we take it at face value (Bergeron and his Empress win a brief victory over the government and give voice to the greatness of which a free humanity is capable) or as a satire of anti-socialist beliefs (by showing that opposition to government is so silly that socialism, as Marx would insist, is bound to succeed in the end.)
Well-written, fun and thought-provoking, maybe the best story in the book. (I like to be the guy who goes against the conventional wisdom, the guy who prefers Gilligan's Island to A Night at the Opera and Led Zeppelin to the Beatles, but "Harrison Bergeron" is irresistible.)
John Wyndham is widely admired, though you may recall that I dumped on his 1955 novel The Chrysalids, AKA Re-Birth, when I read it in long ago 2015. Let's see if this story, first seen in Fantastic, and since reprinted in many Wyndham collections and horror anthologies, is more to my taste.
"Close Behind Him" is not a science fiction story at all, but a supernatural horror story, more or less a vampire story. It is good, though, so thumbs up.
Our protagonists are a pair of burglars, Smudger and Spotty, who bust into a big old house whose owner lives alone, but periodically holds some kind of well-attended, sinister occult meetings. The owner attacks them like an animal, biting and clawing instead of defending his life and property with a weapon, and Spotty kills him with the pipe he carries to deal with homeowners who give trouble. When they abscond from the house the thieves find that Spotty is being "pursued" by red bloody footprints which match his own footfalls, each appearing a few yards behind him as he takes a step. Smudger murders his colleague, hoping to escape this paranormal pursuit, but then the steps start following him.
Wyndham's story is mysterious enough that for a while we readers can suspect that justice is being served, that the burglars, as punishment for committing murder, are being harried by something akin to the Greek Furies (I've kind of got the Furies on the brain because of my recent reading of T. S. Eliot's The Family Reunion and still more recent reading of Lyndall Gordon's discussion of that play in her book T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life.) Back at Smudger's home this theory is exploded. The bloody footprints gradually appear closer and closer, and, after two days of suffering a life-sapping anemia and dreams of a black hovering manlike form, Smudger dies. The doctor who looks in on the burglar is present when Smudger expires, and, as he leaves, Smudger's wife sees that the footprints are now following the medical man. Why is the monster chasing the doctor? Presumably it is just a hungry beast, not any sort of avenger of wrongs.
This story is well-written and has a good basic concept, but I think the confusion over the monster's character--what exactly is it and what "rules" does it follow?--is a weakness. There are early clues that the homeowner is some kind of male witch or maybe a werewolf, but then the importance of blood and Smudger's dreams and anemia put you in mind of a vampire. The doctor thinks Smudger is just suffering hallucinations born of a guilty conscience and knowledge of lines from Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but we know he is wrong because Spotty and Liz (Smudger's wife) also see the footprints, and that they are real because Liz wipes up the blood. None of these classic templates--Greek Fury, witch, lycanthrope, vampire, hallucination--really fits what is going on and Wyndham doesn't supply any clear explanation of what is going on. I guess the monster is just a "ghost" that does whatever would be scary at the moment?
Still, a decent piece of work.
Early this year I read Young's "The Ogress" and found it to be an entertaining enough adventure story with a sort of high-concept premise ("what if the gods and monsters of ancient myth were real, super-beings created by the collective psychic energy of primitive superstitious people, and on other planets there are primitive villagers who unwittingly create these dangerous creatures and the Terran government needs to send out hunters to destroy them?") Hopefully this story will be at least as good.
It's the early Sixties--the early 2060s! When salaryman George Danby was a kid he was one of the last people to be taught in a school building by a robot teacher because his little rural town couldn't get TV reception; his own nine-year-old is taught over the television like all the kids nowadays. But George doesn't think it is quite the same, and when he sees a refurbished fourth-grade robot teacher in the window of an antique shop, he is moved to buy it. He's buying it to help his kid study, and to help his wife Laura with the cooking and sewing, of course--he's definitely not buying Miss Jones because of those blue eyes and that hair that "made him think of September sunlight..."!
Some SF stories speculate about future societies which are radically different from the society in which the writer lives; Heinlein has people on the moon with new marriage practices, Delany and Lee have societies in which getting a sex change is trivially easy, Sturgeon has the planet where incest is the norm, Wolfe has his future of illiterate immortals, and on and on. And then there is the SF that just depicts the society in which the writer lives but with futuristic trappings. In "Thirty Days Had September" Young depicts a caricature of the 1950s with robots thrown in so he can air his rather conventional gripes about postwar America.
Miss Jones is not a hit at the Danby household because it criticizes the TV shows Laura and the brat watch all day--the siege of Troy, the aftermath of the war of Eteocles and Polynices, and the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, all reimagined as Westerns--and because the private companies who operate the tele-education system have filled viewers' heads with anti-robot-teacher propaganda. The brat even kicks Miss Jones, damaging it so it limps. Late one night, after he's had a few beers, George sits with his arm around Miss Jones while the machine recites some original lines from Romeo and Juliet--it's one of the happiest moments in George's life! But Laura comes out of the bedroom and catches them, and insists George return Miss Jones to the antique store.
But this story has a happy ending! Laura's dream is to replace their Buick with a Cadillac, so she does not complain when George starts working nights at a hot dog stand to make some extra money. Laura will probably never find out that the owner of the hot dog stand has purchased Miss Jones to perform as a member of his wait staff!
Young in "Thirty Days Had September" calls out the citizens of the land of the free and the home of the brave for their obsession with automobiles and TV Westerns, their consumerism, and, I guess, the fact that most of them aren't kicking back after a long day working at the office or cooking, cleaning and raising the kids at home with volumes of Homer, Sophocles and Shakespeare. Young suggests that postwar America is a society in which life is meaningless. One of the problems of his story is that Young doesn't suggest where people should find meaning or where they found meaning before the rise of America's car- and TV- oriented consumer culture. The average person is not going to find meaning in life reading ancient Greek and Renaissance English literature, and Young doesn't mention some of the obvious things that have given meaning to the lives of ordinary people in the past, things like religion or working with their hands. Miss Jones obviously represents the more meaningful rural life of George's past (half a dozen times we are told she reminds him of "September"), but how that life was more meaningful is left unsaid; maybe Young thinks it is obvious?
One way people imbue their lives with meaning is through loving relationships with their family members, and Young does address this, perhaps obliquely. Laura and the brat, avatars of consumerist TV and car culture, are obviously not going to offer opportunities for meaningful love relationships, but perhaps Miss Jones, a robot, is. Young includes many descriptions of Laura and Miss Jones's physical appearance, and while both are described as attractive, Laura is described primarily in sexual terms (she's had her breasts augmented, for example), while Miss Jones is more wholesome--we do hear about the rise and fall of her breasts as she mimics human breathing, but mostly we are told that her face and hair and so on remind George of "September." In one weird metaphor George looks at Laura in her pajamas, which have images of automobiles printed on them, and imagines she is allowing the cars to "run rampant over her body, letting them defile her breasts and her belly and her legs...." Are we supposed to think consumer culture has ruined sex, made sex disgusting? Maybe we are supposed to see Laura as a shallow, materialistic and status-obsessed creature who is only good for (debased) sex, and Miss Jones as a sort of Beatrice figure, a beautiful but chaste woman who will lead George to a spiritually fulfilling life? (That's Lyndall Gordon's influence on me again--Gordon has a whole riff on how, after his disastrous marriage to the unstable Vivien Haigh-Wood, whom he married because he wanted to lose his virginity, Eliot sees the respectable and even-tempered Emily Hale as his own Beatrice figure.) My Beatrice theory would be stronger if Young actually mentioned Dante or Virgil, which he does not do.
If we strip away the sex stuff, the tone and theme of this story is reminiscent of Ray Bradbury's work--the hostility to TV and cars, fear that books will vanish, nostalgia about small town America, sentimental depiction of a relationship with a robot, etc.
Not bad; like Helen Urban's "The Finer Breed," "Thirty Days Had September" is perhaps an interesting historical document that reflects the complaints of intellectual types about 1950s America, and it is perhaps also worthy of the attention of students of SF for its depictions of women and sex (feminists could easily do a whole madonna-whore analysis of this story) and for its invocation of "serious" literature.
First printed in F&SF, "Thirty Days Had September" has been reprinted in numerous American and foreign anthologies, many with a robot theme.
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It is good to leave An ABC of Science Fiction on a high note after some of the rough patches we had to go through there in the middle.
So, can I recommend An ABC of Science Fiction? Well, it looks like I judged eight stories "good," ten stories "acceptable" and eight stories "bad." That sounds like a pretty good average, to be honest. People considering purchasing a copy have to also take into account the type of stories Boardman favors; despite the advertising text on the first page, An ABC of Science Fiction is not really representative of the whole range of SF, much of which is optimistic and fun. This anthology has a high proportion of joke stories and satires--there are few realistic stories or hard SF engineering-based stories or adventure-type stories or utopias--and a high proportion of pessimistic stories--there are lots of stories with criminals as protagonists and lots of stories in which human society is outwitted, defeated, or actually collapses, and few stories in which people solve problems or triumph over obstacles. Sometimes in SF we find stories that criticize our society by providing a contrasting example, or that show that people can grow and societies can change--there are quite a few SF stories in which the agent of the evil corporation joins the noble rebels or in which the soldier of the racist military joins the aliens to war against his own people or in which goody good aliens teach or force us naughty naughty humans to behave. Most of the stories here in An ABC of Science Fiction, however, present no such hope--we are bad and doomed, and maybe on our way to hell we will infect other races with our evil--this thing is all Goofus and no Gallant.
OK, let's rank order the stories. I am confident in my judgement of in which of the three categories each story belongs, and less confident of the proper rank of each story within its category. Life is short, and I am not going to devote a lot of time to figuring out if the lameness of the limericks of "B. T. H. Xerxes" outweighs the odiousness of Damon Knight's "Maid to Measure" and should pull it down to the very bottom of the heap.
GOOD
"Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut
"The Fence" by Clifford Simak
"Let's Be Frank" by Brian Aldiss
"No Moon for Me" by Walter M. Miller
"Project Hush" by William Tenn
"X Marks the Pedwalk" by Fritz Leiber
"Thirty Days Had September" by Robert F. Young
"Close Behind Him" by John Wyndham
ACCEPTABLE
"Homey Atmosphere" by Daniel F. Galouye
"Day at the Beach" by Carol Emshwiller
"Love Story" by Eric Frank Russell
"The Awakening" by Arthur C. Clarke
"The Conquest by the Moon" by Washington Irving
"He Had a Big Heart" by Frank Quattrocchi
"In the Bag" by Laurence M. Janifer
"The Finer Breed" by Helen M. Urban
"The Great Slow Kings" by Roger Zelazny
"Pattern" by Fredric Brown
BAD
"Family Resemblance" by Alan E. Nourse**********
"Final Exam" by Chad Oliver
"Mute Milton" by Harry Harrison
"The Bitterest Pill" by Frederik Pohl
"I Do Not Hear You, Sir" by Avram Davidson
"The King of the Beasts" by Philip Jose Farmer
Three Limericks by B. T. H. Xerxes
"Maid to Measure" by Damon Knight
More short science fiction stories from my shelf of anthologies in our next episode!
